Download or read book The God Helmet Experiments written by Todd Murphy and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-27 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The God Helmet Experiments is about the research which led to a technology that created a wide range of religious, mystic, and spiritual experiences in the laboratory. These included some visions of god, out of body experiences, waking dreams, apparitions, and the feeling that there is someone standing behind you when no one is there. It's even elicited Near-Death Experience phenomena. Used in other ways, the God Helmet has also created paranormal experiences, including ghostly visions. There were even a few experiments successfully applying the God Helmet for depression.The God Helmet was developed by two scientists at Laurentian University's behavioral neurosciences program, Stan Koren, and Dr. Michael Persinger, who was the director of the research group until he passed away in 2017. The editor took some of Dr. Michael Persinger's difficult to read scientific papers about the God Helmet, and rewrote them to make them easier to read. This book is designed to help you understand the God Helmet, the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences, and even presents some material related to the debates and misunderstandings in this area of brain science. The God Helmet Experiments is a new kind of science book, letting the reader see the actual research. It's still a work of science, and still calls for some careful reading, though it's very much easier to read and understand than the original scientific journal articles. Dr. Michael Persinger was Todd Murphy's (this book's editor) mentor for 23 years, and they even published a few papers together. Not only can The God Helmet Experiments help you to understand the how the brain contributes to spiritual experiences, but it will also let you see the other exciting possibilities in this fascinating technology (low intensity complex magnetic signal stimulation). The book has three sections. The first is dedicated to some of Dr.Persinger's longer review and summary articles, four in all. The second is a series of experiments using the God Helmet, recounting the experiments, one by one. The third is a response to Persinger's critics and their (unfounded) criticism. Dr. Michael Persinger published over 500 articles in scientific journals during his career, and this volume only scratches the surface. Nevertheless, this collection of simplified papers by Dr. Persinger includes some of the most important "review" articles, where he summarizes his work. One day, mysticism and mystic experience could be available to every human being through this technology, or a future version of it that no one can now imagine. There may be a few errors and typos in this book, and we ask the reader to be understanding about them. Let the author know, and they'll be fixed in a future revision. Thank you.
Download or read book Sacred Pathways written by Todd Murphy and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Currently sale priced) "... illuminating ..." - The Dalai Lama.Sacred Pathways explains how the brain areas that support Near-Death Experiences are also the basis for mystic experience during our lives. It's a 21st century synthesis of science and spirituality by brain scientist Todd Murphy, in which spiritual, religious, and mystic events are explained with neuroscience.Edited and re-edited to make the science easy to understand, it's a readable introduction to the science of the spiritual.Murphy uses Darwin's theory of evolution to understand the human death-process, and proposes that reincarnation is an evolutionary adaptation which contributed to the survival of our species. The book explores the ideas that the self is actually a hallucination, God is a manifestation of a part of ourselves, and enlightenment comes from a blast of neural activity in specific parts of the brain. It also looks at prayer, spontaneous mystic experiences, romantic love, and psychic skills. The author also believes that spirituality is a very positive force, both in the world and in our lives. Spirituality, he argues, is an adaptive force that's crucial to our survival as a species, making it an integral part of human nature. An atheist who openly encourages prayer, Murphy goes past the debates between skeptics and believers and shows how religion helps us, without regard for the truth or falsehood of anyone's beliefs. Sacred Pathways is a fascinating example of no-nonsense 'new science' at its best.This extensively referenced tour-de-force work explains the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences including, enlightenment, prayer, near-death experiences, and even psychic perception. It also explains reincarnation, out-of-body experiences and the spiritual nature of romantic love.It includes a chapter that summarizes Murphy's concept of reincarnation; the first to be published by a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It also has an in-depth discussion of the famous God Helmet, and explains how psychic skills work, based on lab experiments with telepathy and remote viewing.Sacred Pathways is a major advance in neurotheology, a synthesis of science and religion that discusses spirituality only in the language of science. Most people in this field confine themselves to looking at what the brain is doing when people have otherworldly experiences, epiphanies, and peak experiences. Murphy goes further than that, seeing these things in the context of anthropology, sociology, and human evolution as well as in the human brain.Todd Murphy has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal for Near-Death Studies, Psychology Reports, NeuroQuantology, and Activitas Nervosa Superior.This fascinating, accessible, and thought provoking book will change the way you see spirituality.Sacred Pathways is "...the principia (principle work) of the scientific investigation of spiritual experiences" (From the forward by Dr. Michael Persinger, inventor of the God Helmet).
Download or read book Principles of Neurotheology written by Assoc Prof Andrew B Newberg and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Neurotheology" has garnered substantial attention in the academic and lay communities in recent years. Several books have been written addressing the relationship between the brain and religious experience and numerous scholarly articles have been published on the topic, some in the popular press. The scientific and religious communities have been very interested in obtaining more information regarding neurotheology, how to approach this topic, and how science and religion can be integrated in some manner that preserves both. If neurotheology is to be considered a viable field going forward, it requires a set of clear principles that can be generally agreed upon and supported by both the theological or religious perspective and the scientific one as well. Principles of Neurotheology sets out the necessary principles of neurotheology which can be used as a foundation for future neurotheological discourse. Laying the groundwork for a new synthesis of scientific and theological dialogue, this book proposes that neurotheology, a term fraught with potential problems, is a highly useful and important voice in the greater study of religious and theological ideas and their intersection with science.
Download or read book God and the Brain written by Kelly James Clark and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does cognitive science show that religious belief is irrational? Kelly James Clark brings together science and philosophy to examine some of humanity’s more pressing questions. Is belief in God, as Richard Dawkins claims, a delusion? Are atheists smarter or more rational than religious believers? Do our genes determine who we are and what we believe? Can our very creaturely cognitive equipment help us discover truth and meaning in life? Are atheists any different from Mother Teresa? Clark’s surprising answers both defend the rationality of religious belief and contribute to the study of cognitive science. God and the Brain explores complicated questions about the nature of belief and the human mind. Scientifically minded, philosophically astute, and reader-friendly, God and the Brain provides an accessible overview of some new cognitive scientific approaches to the study of religion and evaluates their implications for both theistic and atheistic belief.
Download or read book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs written by Michael Persinger and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1987-10-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, the scientific principles of learning and brain functions are applied to the God Experience. The author skillfully blends modern neurophysiology with critical behavioral psychology to offer an objective explanation for why people believe in God. This provocative and scholarly work will interest psychologists, neuroscientists, clergy, and anyone studying mystical experience.
Download or read book The Neurology of Religion written by Alasdair Coles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines what can be learnt about the brain mechanisms underlying religious practice from studying people with neurological disorders.
Download or read book Religion and the Sciences of Origins written by Kelly James Clark and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise introduction to science and religion focuses on Christianity and modern Western science (the epicenter of issues in science and religion in the West) with a concluding chapter on Muslim and Jewish Science and Religion. This book also invites the reader into the relevant literature with ample quotations from original texts.
Download or read book Nothing to be Frightened Of written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-05-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I don’t believe in God, but I miss him." So begins Julian Barnes’s brilliant new book that is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God and a homage to the writer Jules Renard. Barnes also draws poignant portraits of the last days of his parents, recalled with great detail, affection and exasperation. Other examples he takes up include writers, "most of them dead and quite a few of them French," as well as some composers, for good measure. The grace with which Barnes weaves together all of these threads makes the experience of reading the book nothing less than exhilarating. Although he cautions us that "this is not my autobiography," the book nonetheless reveals much about Barnes the man and the novelist: how he thinks and how he writes and how he lives. At once deadly serious and dazzlingly playful, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a wise, funny and constantly surprising tour of the human condition.
Download or read book The Woman in the Pith Helmet written by Jennie Ebeling and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the career of Norma Franklin, an archaeologist who has made important contributions to our understanding of the three key cities of Samaria, Megiddo, and Jezreel in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the Iron Age. The sixteen essays offered herein by Franklin's colleagues in archaeology and biblical studies are a fitting tribute to the woman in the pith helmet: an indomitable field archaeologist who describes herself as "happiest with complex stratigraphy" and dedicated to "killing sacred cows."
Download or read book Fingerprints of God written by Barbara Bradley Hagerty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From analyses of the brain functions of Buddhist monks and Carmelite nuns, to the question of whether directed prayer can heal the sick, to what near-death experiences reveal about the afterlife, Hagerty reaches beyond what we think we know to understand whether the ineffable place beyond this world can be rationally - even scientifically - explained."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Believing Brain written by Michael Shermer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Download or read book Skeptic written by Michael Shermer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected essays from bestselling author Michael Shermer's celebrated columns in Scientific American For fifteen years, bestselling author Michael Shermer has written a column in Scientific American magazine that synthesizes scientific concepts and theory for a general audience. His trademark combination of deep scientific understanding and entertaining writing style has thrilled his huge and devoted audience for years. Now, in Skeptic, seventy-five of these columns are available together for the first time; a welcome addition for his fans and a stimulating introduction for new readers.
Download or read book The Afterlife Experiments written by Gary E. Schwartz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-03-13 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An esteemed scientist's personal journey from skepticism to wonder and awe provides astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death? Are love and life eternal? This exciting account presents provocative evidence that could upset everything that science has ever taught. Daring to risk his worldwide academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, along with his research partner Dr. Linda Russek, asked some of the most prominent mediums in America -- including John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson -- to become part of a series of extraordinary experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS This riveting narrative, with its electrifying transcripts, puts the reader on the scene of a breakthrough scientific achievement: contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions. In stringently monitored experiments, leading mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. The messages that came through stunned sitters and researchers alike. Here, as they unfolded in the laboratory setting, are uncanny revelations about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Dr. Schwartz was forced by the overwhelmingly positive data to abandon his skepticism, reaching some startling conclusions. Compelling from the first page to the last, The Afterlife Experiments is the amazing documentation of groundbreaking experiments you will never forget.
Download or read book The Spiritual Brain written by Mario Beauregard and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A very important book, clearly explaining non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader.” — Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD, Research Psychiatrist, UCLA, author of The Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain “The Spiritual Brain is a wonderful and important book...a necessary read for both the scientist and the religious person.” — Andrew Newberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania.and co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe. “A refreshing antidote to the arguments offered by some scientists who insist that their minds, and yours, are meaningless illusions.” — Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds “A sweeping critique of the trend to explain away religious experience as a brain artifact, pathology, or evolutionary quirk.” — Publishers Weekly In clear, readable prose, avoiding highly technical language, neuroscientist Beauregard argues merely physical explanations for religious experience are insufficient. Recommended.” — Library Journal Lends scientific credence to the existence of a higher or universal consciousness. — Booklist (starred review) Drawing on Beauregard’s own research into religious experiences, a researched case for the nonmaterial—and ultimately spiritual—nature of man. — World Magazine Beauregard uses evidence to show that the self or soul is not simply locked inside the skull. — Philadelphia Inquirer I heartily advocate the purchase of this book — Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary have produced a provocatively titled book covering an equally provocative topic. — Christian's Scholar Review
Download or read book The Looney Experiment written by Luke Reynolds and published by Blink. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author Luke Reynolds’s humorous and heart-warming contemporary novel, The Looney Experiment, chronicles one boy’s journey through bullying, first love, and an up-close examination of the meaning of courage. Atticus Hobart couldn’t feel lower. He’s in love with a girl who doesn’t know he exists, he is the class bully’s personal punching bag, and to top it all off, his dad has just left the family. Into this drama steps Mr. Looney, a 77-year-old substitute English teacher with uncanny insight and a most unconventional approach to teaching. But Atticus soon discovers there’s more to Mr. Looney’s methods than he’d first thought. And as Atticus begins to unlock the truths within his own name, he finds that his hyper-imagination can help him forge his own voice, and maybe—just maybe—discover that the power to face his problems was inside him all along.
Download or read book On the Sacred Disease written by Hippocrates and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other diseases. And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is cured, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations. But if it is reckoned divine because it is wonderful, instead of one there are many diseases which would be sacred; for, as I will show, there are others no less wonderful and prodigious, which nobody imagines to be sacred. The quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers, seem to me no less sacred and divine in their origin than this disease, although they are not reckoned so wonderful. And I see men become mad and demented from no manifest cause, and at the same time doing many things out of place; and I have known many persons in sleep groaning and crying out, some in a state of suffocation, some jumping up and fleeing out of doors, and deprived of their reason until they awaken, and afterward becoming well and rational as before, although they be pale and weak; and this will happen not once but frequently. And there are many and various things of the like kind, which it would be tedious to state particularly. They who first referred this malady to the gods appear to me to have been just such persons as the conjurors, purificators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, who give themselves out for being excessively religious, and as knowing more than other people. Such persons, then, using the divinity as a pretext and screen of their own inability to of their own inability to afford any assistance, have given out that the disease is sacred, adding suitable reasons for this opinion, they have instituted a mode of treatment which is safe for themselves, namely, by applying purifications and incantations, and enforcing abstinence from baths and many articles of food which are unwholesome to men in diseases. Of sea substances, the surmullet, the blacktail, the mullet, and the eel; for these are the fishes most to be guarded against. And of fleshes, those of the goat, the stag, the sow, and the dog: for these are the kinds of flesh which are aptest to disorder the bowels. Of fowls, the cock, the turtle, and the bustard, and such others as are reckoned to be particularly strong. And of potherbs, mint, garlic, and onions; for what is acrid does not agree with a weak person. And they forbid to have a black robe, because black is expressive of death; and to sleep on a goat’s skin, or to wear it, and to put one foot upon another, or one hand upon another; for all these things are held to be hindrances to the cure. All these they enjoin with reference to its divinity, as if possessed of more knowledge, and announcing beforehand other causes so that if the person should recover, theirs would be the honor and credit; and if he should die, they would have a certain defense, as if the gods, and not they, were to blame, seeing they had administered nothing either to eat or drink as medicines, nor had overheated him with baths, so as to prove the cause of what had happened. But I am of opinion that (if this were true) none of the Libyans, who live in the interior, would be free from this disease, since they all sleep on goats’ skins, and live upon goats’ flesh; neither have they couch, robe, nor shoe that is not made of goat’s skin, for they have no other herds but goats and oxen. But if these things, when administered in food, aggravate the disease, and if it be cured by abstinence from them, godhead is not the cause at all; nor will purifications be of any avail, but it is the food which is beneficial and prejudicial, and the influence of the divinity vanishes.
Download or read book No Biking in the House Without a Helmet written by Melissa Fay Greene and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dispatches from the new front lines of parenthood When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia." Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. She's been praised for her "historian's urge for accuracy," her "sociologist's sense of social nuance," and her "writerly passion for the beauty of language." But Melissa and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "We so loved raising our four children by birth, we didn't want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers." When the number of children hit nine, Greene took a break from reporting. She trained her journalist's eye upon events at home. Fisseha was riding a bike down the basement stairs; out on the porch, a squirrel was sitting on Jesse's head; vulgar posters had erupted on bedroom walls; the insult niftam (the Amharic word for "snot") had led to fistfights; and four non-native-English-speaking teenage boys were researching, on Mom's computer, the subject of "saxing." "At first I thought one of our trombone players was considering a change of instrument," writes Greene. "Then I remembered: they can't spell." Using the tools of her trade, she uncovered the true subject of the "saxing" investigation, inspiring the chapter "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn't Spell." A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening—No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.
